I don’t know if I’d keep quiet about it, or conversely be incapable of shutting up about it, if I arrived one morning and found out that I now worked here.
Author: John Page 70 of 121
Maybe it’s just me, but this feels wrong – a step too far.
What next? Jack Black brings out his own range of scotch eggs? Diane Lane’s pre-cooked tagines?
And hey, why restrict this stuff to food? Go on, knock yourself out!
Sylvester Stallone’s range of dungarees! Denzel Washington’s series of external hard drives! Scarlett Johansson’s range of CDs of Tom Waits covers!
As this here blog has been linked in Rich Johnson’s comic gossip column Lying In The Gutters, I seem to be attracting a few more readers of a graphic-fiction-sequential-art mind. Welcome, welcome – hope you’ll come for the comics but stay for … er, well, more than just that, I guess.
Anyway, I wanted to ask the comics-knowledgeable amongst you for advice or recommendations on a specific theme; I’m fairly au fait with what’s going on in the UK and US mainstream (and occasionally the small press), but am only just starting to venture further into reading manga.
The problem I have is that there seem to be just so many titles to choose from, and I’m looking for pointers on stuff of interest. I’m less aware of what I’m after than what I want to avoid, if that makes sense – I’m not really interested in post-apocalyptic stuff (I liked the film of Akira, but got a bit bored after the first few issues of the Epic translation) or fantasy stuff with dragons and the like in, and I’m not really looking for anything featuring psychic schoolgirls and/or panty shots (this latter aspect made me less keen on Battle Royale v1, which I read recently, and the violence and pantie-flashing seemed a bit calculated, though the linework was nice).
Manga I have read and enjoyed are:
Lone Wolf and Cub – Read the entire series (in the really rather delightfully-sized Dark Horse reprints), and though it was a bit long, it was always interesting, especially as the over-arching plots became clear.
Old Boy – recently finished this, and though the ending didn’t justify the length or the bad guy’s motivation at all to my mind, it was well-drawn. I preferred the film, but this was enjoyable enough to read.
Death Note – I’m seven volumes into this now, and am enjoying it a lot. For a book which often features people standing round talking or thinking, it’s genuinely exciting in places, and the characters are interesting if not necessarily likeable. There’s a fantasy element to this one, yes, but the real-world grounding of it works for me.
Monster – Oddly enough, I picked this up after it was recommended by Masi Oka (who plays Hiro in ‘Heroes’) in an interview, and I’m only just starting the second book, but I like the general mood and premise, so I’ll probably continue.
Buddha – I’m onto the third volume of this, and can see why Tezuka’s so well respected; there’s sense of fun and pace to it all, as well as it being the story of a chap I’m genuinely interested in.
… and that’s about it. As I say, I’m not mad keen on the kind of stories mentioned above, but then again, if there’s a really good story about a psychic schoolgirl that I really, REALLY ought to read, then just ignore my prejudices and recommend away. It’s not as if I haven’t been wrong on things before, after all.
If you’ve got recommendations (or even warnings about works to avoid), please feel free to post a comment. I’m genuinely keen to learn more about manga, and as it seems that there are a lot of different genres within it, I feel rather spoiled for choice. So if you could let me know stuff you’ve read and enjoyed, I’d appreciate it (and so would my wallet, as it’ll save me wasting my hard-earned).
And for the jokers amongst you, no I don’t think I want to read loads of Yaoi or Shojo stuff (blimey, there’s a whole new set of terms for me to learn, isn’t there?)…
So, this book comes out next week – Sebastian Faulks (whose work I must admit I haven’t read, though people whose opinions I trust speak highly of his writing) has written a new James Bond novel (with the blessing of Fleming’s estate). All very well and good, but what’s that in the bottom right-hand corner?
‘Sebastian Faulks Writing As Ian Fleming’, it seems.
Now, maybe I’m just exacting to the point of pedantry, but you can’t really claim that, can you? Oh, sure, when Virginia ‘Flowers In The Attic’ Andrews died the family got another author to be cover-credited as ‘The New Virginia Andrews’, rather bewilderingly, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen the phrase ‘writing as’ used (by which I mean misused) in such a way.
‘Writing as’ is, you see, used when you’re writing under a pseudonym, not trying to write something in the style of another author. There are high-profile authors who’ve ‘written as’ – Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman or Norah Roberts as JD Robb , but that’s because those were made-up names and not real people they were seeking to emulate (given that Bachman allegedly claimed his religion was ‘rooster worship’, that’s probably for the best in Steve K’s case).
For crying out loud, when Kingsley Amis wrote a Bond book, he did so under a pseudonym, but the editions of that book which state his true identity say it was ‘Kingsley Amis writing as Robert Markham’ (as you can just about see if you peer at the bottom of the cover here).
I’m guessing it’s not Mr Faulks’s fault; he seems to be a genuine fan of Fleming’s work, and is trying to emulate the style of Fleming – but then again, so was Raymond Benson, the previous author who wrote authorised Bond novels, and his cover credit wasn’t that he was writing as Ian Fleming, it was just his name. Unlike Faulks, who’s well-known in his own right, Benson could probably have used that kind of promotional push. And marketing is where I think the idea for this bizarre bit of branding probably originated, to be honest – I just wish that they’d put something like ‘After’ or ‘In The Style Of’ or… I dunno, maybe come up with their own set of words to describe it, rather than using a phrase which already has a meaning.
Unless, of course, this is the way the popular kids are using the phrase ‘writing as’ now. That being the case, this post is by John Soanes, Writing As Charles Dickens.
Friday, 6.53pm, a designer is on the phone:
“Look, I know I said I’d be home in time to say goodnight to the kids, but I… no, it won’t wait until Monday, it’s got to be done before I go home.
What? Oh, I dunno, it’s about a Chinese policeman or something… anyway, I need to – what? Hang on… yeah, you might be onto something there, actually.
Yeah, I can do that – just take that Japanese novel from a couple of years ago, and maybe take off the knife… hmm, still looks a bit similar, someone might notice. Oh, I know, it’s a thriller, I’ll just colour the whole image red. Brilliant. Blurbs top and bottom… and I’m done.
Yeah, yeah, all done now, tell the kids I’ll be back in less than an hour.
Yes, I love you too. Bye.”
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I recently sent off some sample chapters of my novel ‘Human Noises’ to a literary agent, asking if they’d like to represent me.
They replied quite quickly, and this week I got a nice polite e-mail back saying that it wasn’t for them. Which is fine – in fact, I was rather pleased that they added a note to the effect that this sort of thing is very subjective, and that I should see what other agencies thought of it. I was planning on doing so anyway, but it was nice of them to add that it’s a subjective thing – which, of course, it is; one man’s Da Vinci Code is… well, okay, my Da Vinci Code, but you know what I mean – there are countless schadenfreude-filled reports of the people who rejected The Beatles, Fred Astaire, Joanne Rowling, and so on. Not that I’m saying my work is of that calibre, of course, but there’s some reassurance for the rest of us in the fact that even those folks knew what it was like to get a ‘thank you, but not for us’ reaction.
So I’m undeterred, and will find another vict- er, I mean agent to send it on to. It may well be that it’s going to be rejected by every agent in town until I’m forced to face the fact it’s unpublishable because it’s a load of garbage (you can reach your own conclusions by checking out the sample chapters here – feel free to let me know what you think), but until then I’ll be sending it out and hoping for some good news… and, of course, working on ‘The Body Orchard’, my next novel.
Well, it’s important to keep the words flowing, wouldn’t you agree?
*PublishAmerica very nearly published Atlanta Nights, so I like to think they might consider me.
In September, DC Comics will be publishing a deluxe reprint of Frank Miller’s 1983-4 comic series Ronin.
Here’s hoping that the oversized, super-deluxe edition restores the line of dialogue which was in the final panel of page 48 of chapter six, and which seems to have been absent from printings of the reprint volume for the last decade or so (see comparison of original and reprint, above).
As with the single digit ‘5’ that was missing from the final chapter of printings of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four following an error in the 1951 edition (it’s what Winston is ‘almost unconsciously tracing with his finger in the dust on the table’), it’s a small omission, but one which seriously detracts from the meaning of the tale’s ending.
All images are, of course, utterly (c) copyright Frank Miller 1983, 2008. No infringement is intended, I’m just an eagle-eyed reader.
I’m always interested in the work of Chris Morris – it might not always have me laughing out loud, but it’s never dull or unoriginal – so was intrigued to find that he’d recently visited the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and recorded a podcast about the subject.
As I said last week, I like a good podcast, and whilst the sound quality often leaves a bit to be desired (I’m guessing they only had one microphone), it’s interesting and worth a listen.
You can read more about how it came to be here, or if you just want to get on with downloading it, right-click and ‘Save Target As…’ here.
Hope you find it as interesting as I did.
Me, ranting on Sunday afternoon:
“I really don’t get it when people are so keen on Sex And The City, I really don’t.
I mean, it’s totally phony and unrealistic, and seems to suggest that if you go out and buy some stuff, your life will be perfect, which has to be unhealthy.
And the worst thing about it is that people seem to take it seriously – a worrying number of women I know quote from things in it as if they’re real situations and as if you can learn from it, despite the fact that half the things they say sound cool or seem to make some kind of sense at first, but when you actually think about them, they’re meaningless, and total breakdowns in logical thinking and… oh my god. I’ve just realised.
Sex And The City is Top Gear for women, isn’t it?”
So, my best Oscar Wilde impression there. I’m certainly working on the rotundity of the post-Reading years, I fear.
Anyway, as you can probably deduce from the picture, I was at a wedding over the weekend – and a fab one it was too, probably one of the best I’ve ever attended, as it was amazingly relaxed. And I say this despite being the Best Man, so you’d think I’d have been all stressed and harried because of my role, but not so.
Doing the speech was, for an egomaniac like me, a delight, and it went over well; I’ll cheerfully admit that I wanted to get tears from some members of the audience for some of the bits of the speech, and indeed there was some dabbing at the corner of the eyes from some of the attendees (though the cynical might suspect this is more to do with suffering than a surge of emotion). And laughter at other points in the speech, which made my ego swell in a way that I only later realised I’d known before.
It was, I suddenly thought, like the times when I used to dabble at stand-up comedy; when it was going well, you could get the crowd to go with you on some of the more fanciful notions, and the brain seemed to think of things and put them into words faster than you might otherwise have thought possible. Like in writing or painting or many other fun pursuits (yes, even that one) you feel very much one with the moment, and the gap between thought and action is startlingly small.
When it goes badly, on the other hand, it’s embarrassing (though that doesn’t really worry me much, on the basis that it’s only a handful of minutes out of my life, usually in front of people I’ll never see again) but more than anything it feels clunky and awkward, as if the words and the ideas themselves are fundamentally wrong in some way. Professional comedians speak of how a joke that kills one night will itself die a death the next, and though I hardly did that many stand-up spots, I certainly had my fair share of ‘hmm, that one worked fine last time’ moments.
Anyway, that’s all rather by the by (and certainly in the past), though it was interesting to have a taste of it once again. M’colleague has suggested that perhaps I should see about becoming a professional best man, which – like so many things he says – I doubt is at all plausible, but one does see adverts offering the services of professional speechwriters, after all. Maybe I could become the Sam Seaborn of the Wedding Speech world ?
Yes, I know, he’s better-looking than me, but I’m talking about the writing of speeches here, not the power to make women swoon…